McKinsey’s Customer experience: New capabilities, new audiences, new opportunities

Across sectors and regions, business leaders are recognizing the competitive advantage of superior customer experience and the value that resides not only in what a company delivers for its customers, but in how it delivers products and services. Where companies once could differentiate themselves by product or efficiency, distinctiveness today increasingly lies in creating a seamless, omni channel customer experience.
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As leaders of McKinsey’s Customer Experience Service Line, we are delighted to present this volume of Customer experience: New capabilities, new audiences, new pportunities. This compendium draws from the collective thinking of our experts and practitioners, and follows by just 18 months our first volume of thinking on the subject. That in itself speaks to how rapidly the landscape of customer experience is evolving, and how intently business leaders are focused on it.
In addition to the perspectives of our own thought leaders, we are privileged to present the views of leading customer-experience practitioners on how they value and pursue customer centric strategies.

Firuzan Iscan, of German insurer Allianz, offers his perspective on applying digitization to customer journeys.

Domingo Sanchez deconstructs the process of improving the customer experience in one of the toughest of customer environments: a major US airport.

We are grateful to them for sharing their unique and expert insights.
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Our earlier volume 1 explored the critical elements of an effective customer-experience strategy that delivers benefits to customers, employees, and the bottom line. These include shaping a “customer back” perspective, the central role of customer journeys (rather than touchpoints), and the importance of forging a vision to close the gap between board direction and frontline engagement.

We kick off our current volume with “The CEO guide to customer experience,” a useful bridge between those perspectives and our thinking on new horizons of activity and opportunity in customer experience.
Among those horizons is a set of new emerging capabilities to capture the value from customer centric strategies, in particular design thinking and digital application. Consider, for example, the way that the lines between products, services, and physical space are blurring across many industries, from banking to automotive manufacturing, and from retail to e-commerce.
In “The expanding role of design in creating an end-to-end customer experience,” we explore the critical role that design now plays in shaping customer experiences, as well as the new competitors it is spawning in traditional industries.
Or consider, as does “Mastering the digital advantage in transforming customer experience,” how companies are becoming better at addressing underlying customer needs through digital experiences, and how digital is facilitating the creation of entirely new experiences in traditional businesses such as insurance.
The focus on customer experience is also opening up entirely new audiences. “Finding the right digital balance in B2B customer experience” elaborates on the need for a thoughtful and precise strategy in bringing the power of digital technology to complex B2B relationships.
“When the customer experience starts at home” explores the power of applying customer-centric thinking to dealings within an organization. When internal services and departments like IT or HR also start to act as creators of superior customer experiences for their users, they enable companies to create exceptional experiences with external customers.

In “Improving the customer experience to achieve government agency goals,” our experts examine why applying customer-centric thinking in government can help the budget-constrained public sector better meet its mission goals.
New opportunities abound in all these areas, as well as in the day-to-day work of improving customer experience.
“Four ways to shape customer-experience measurement for impact” explores why many companies are themselves unhappy as customers, with their jumble of metrics systems, and offers ways to find more effective, holistic solutions.
Finally, “Avoiding the seven deadly sins of customer experience transformations” provides a cautionary tale of the temptations that can scuttle even well-intentioned efforts to transform customer experience.

The customer-experience landscape is changing rapidly, and knowing how to operate in it is becoming more and more of a strategic imperative.